Day One of isolating only has me mildly crazy so we’ll see how the rest of my five days goes. Honestly the biggest problem right now is not having access to my computer.
Month: May 2022
I had a lot of things to do today
… so I took a two-hour nap as soon as I got home, and now I’m going to stay awake just long enough to make it decent and I’m going right back to bed. There’s a slight possibility that I’m getting sick again but I think it’s just allergies and the stress from the week bleeding off.
Some recent developments
I listened to Down With the Sickness and Fuck Dying on the way home from work two different days this week.
We have recently discovered that not only is Fatima deaf, or at least very close to it (at least one ear appears to be completely bollixed, which I’m pretty sure is the medical term) but she may have been so for her entire life. How no one appears to have noticed this until now is left as an exercise for the viewer. How this will affect her ability to learn English, however, remains my problem for at least eight more days. I would love to say that I’ve been able to help these kids adapt to living in America, but … not so much, I think. If I stay in education, I do plan to spend some time this summer learning at least a little bit of Pashto, because I don’t think these families are going to stop coming anytime soon.
In other news, I covered for one of the 7th grade teachers yesterday afternoon, and without realizing I was doing it, I did myself a big favor. One of the problems with working in a school where you don’t know all of the kids (and I don’t know any of the kids below 8th grade, nor do I know all of the 8th graders, although I’d bet I’m at 90% or so) is that the only kids who are visible to you are the shitheads. I’m pretty sure I can identify at least half of the 7th grade shitheads at least by their faces, although I don’t know a lot of names. The good kids? They’re invisible, because they don’t fuck up in the hallways (they’re mostly not in the hallways in the first place) and so you never notice them. It was the same thing as when I worked at the grant coordinator at the school before I quit– I was working in the office. Who gets sent to the office? Shitheads! Whose names do you know? Shitheads! So it’s easy to assume they’re all like that.
Well, one way or another, I got lucky and landed on what turned out to be this particular teacher’s favorite class. And they were fun! It’s not like we did a lot of academic stuff or anything like that but I sat and chatted with several of them for a while and just in general interacting with all of them was pleasant. There’s always a lot of trepidation in covering kids you don’t know in a class you don’t know, because who the hell knows what kind of shit you could be getting yourself into, so this was helpful. At least I know a few who might actually be nice to have in class next year.
If, y’know, I lose my mind and come back again.
In which I think not
Missing a day once in a while is no big deal, even if I don’t do it very often. But I refuse to be busy enough to miss two days in a row, even if the post for that second day is a ridiculous two-sentence half-assed excuse for a blog post.
This one is three sentences.
Holy shit IT WORKED
My student loans have been forgiven. They are gone. They are ex-loans. I am, at 45, done paying for my degrees.
If you work for a school district (even if you don’t teach; literally just if you work for a school district) or are in any way involved in public service at your job and you have existing student loans, click here and check the TEPSLF program out right now. (Note that to the best of my knowledge everything in that piece is still accurate except for the refund check, which I think only applies if you’re still making payments while they’re processing your paperwork; those specific payments will be refunded. I no longer think I get any of my excess payments back, although I’d love to be wrong.)
Close to 70 grand, y’all. Poof.
I’d like to issue a public thank you to the Biden administration.
Happy motherfuckin’ Monday.
Ugh
I had actually been having a pretty good Sunday until a few minutes ago, when the exact same settings that I’ve been using for months to create videos for my YouTube site suddenly decided to shit the bed and produce a 31-gigabyte un-openable monstrosity, and now not only do I not have my videos for tomorrow ready but I get to spend time researching how to repair damaged .mp4 files, which I don’t think is actually a thing that can be done. I’m pretty sure it’s all scams and “Okay, this will work, but send us $70 first” types of things.
Shit.
Anyway, if there’s no 4:00 video tomorrow (there won’t be) that’s why.
#REVIEW: King of the Rising, by Kacen Callender
I was not a huge fan of the first volume of Kacen Callender’s Islands of Blood and Storm duology, Queen of the Conquered. Feel free to click through to the review, of course, but the short version is that I felt like the book was both too ambitious for its own good and a main character who was not only not especially likable to the reader but was also flatly detested by literally every single character in the book. It had potential, though, and I decided to keep an eye on Callender in the future although at the time I wasn’t committing to picking up the sequel to the book.
Well. Kacen Callender is from St. Thomas, in the US Virgin Islands, and I hadn’t read a book from there last year, so …
It took a while to get to it; in fact, when I picked it up yesterday it had been on my unread shelf since 2021, and had spent more time there than any other book on the shelf. I honestly just picked it up to get it out of the way, and for a brief moment I considered not actually reading it, since it’s not like the Read Around the World thing is something official any longer.
*cough*
It’s a lot better.
King of the Rising begins exactly where Queen of the Conquered left off, at the beginning of a massive slave revolt on an archipelago colonized by the white-skinned Fjern, and if you want the historical equivalent you need nothing more than to recall that Callender is a St. Thomian, and St. Thomas was colonized by the Dutch. What makes this a fantasy novel and not just thinly-veiled historical fiction is the existence of Kraft, which is basically X-Men style magical powers that some of the characters possess. Kraft, if I’m being honest, is the weakest part of the book and in general its main role in the plot is to give the main character of this book and the main character of the last book a way to communicate with each other across long distances.
That switch in narrators is probably the singe change that that played the biggest role in my enjoying this book more than Queen. Sigourney was kind of rough as a narrator. She was very passive in a lot of ways and literally everyone hated her, and she just wasn’t a great choice as an MC. This book is told from the perspective of Løren Jannik, her half-brother, and while Sigourney still plays a pretty significant role in the story, Løren is a much more dynamic character than she was. He is still flawed, certainly; one of the major themes of the book is leadership during crisis, and the book isn’t interested in backing away from his failures as both a leader of the revolt and as a person in general. But the main thing is that he makes decisions during the book and while some of them are definitely bad decisions, at least he acts throughout the course of the book. Sigourney was just too passive, and pushing her offscreen or at least into the background made King of the Rising a superior read.
I probably should have put this first, but, like, you don’t need a trigger warning for this one, do you? Because this book is about a slave revolt against a colonial slave power, with everything that implies, and it can be a really fucking rough read. If you read Queen of the Conquered you should absolutely pick this up even if you didn’t particularly like it. If you did like Queen, I feel like you’ll really enjoy this one.
Flumph found!
He’s probably not even an inch tall, guys. He’s so, SO small. But he’s a flumph and he’s mine.
Honestly, out of a possible 32 unique figures in the brick I got 30, which for blind boxes really isn’t bad. I still don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with these– they’re sort of sitting awkwardly on my desk right now, as I type this– but I was kind of hoping that I’d have killed the bug with this first brick and I don’t think I did, which is deeply Goddamned alarming.
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